Statistics, odds and ends.

So in a couple of weeks my ten years of reading will be over and I'll start a new year. In ten years' time, I have read 1,358 books (and will hopefully add at least one more to the total before December 31.)

The year in which I read the most books was 2008: 168 books. This was the year after I joined Paperback Swap, and I was reading and trading maniacally. (I was a member for six or seven years, and then I came to a point where the books I wanted to read were not the ones being traded any more. But I found some fantastic books through that site.)

The year in which I read the least books was this year, 2016. Right now my total stands at 69. One reason for this enormous drop-off (I have always easily broken 100 books every other year) was too much time spent following politics online, and another reason was an unrealized need for progressive lenses. I started reading more once I could see better!

I don't set reading goals. I like to let my desires and interests take me where they will. But I really do hope to do better than 69 books next year. I suspect reading will be a good escape in the midst of whatever 2017 holds.

I've listed my good reads, now what about my bad reads? I don't have a lot of one-star books on my list, because if a book is that bad, I usually just don't finish it. I have no qualms about dropping a book--or drop-kicking it! Several one- and two-star books loom large, though:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
Empire, Orson Scott Card
The Ladies of Missalonghi, Colleen McCullough
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
The Crimes of Charlotte Bronte, James Tully
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
The Astronaut Wives' Club, Lily Koppel
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Katherine Howe
The Storied Life of A.J Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin

These all went past merely bad into the realm of actively pissing me off, for being poorly plotted, under-researched, and/or just plain obnoxious. Fortunately, these books are fairly rare.

I'm excited to see what great reads await me in the next ten years!

Also-rans, non-fiction.

Four-star non-fiction reads are still pretty awesome. Here are some of the ones I still remember and think about.

Catch a Wave: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of Brian Wilson, Peter Ames Carlin

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, Terry Ryan

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic, Steven Johnson

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson

An Autobiography, Agatha Christie

Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece that Changed the World, Russell Martin

Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood, Michael Walker

The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the End of the First Millennium, Robert Lacey

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, and Other Things I've Learned, Alan Alda

Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, Gary Giddons

The Perfect Summer: Dancing Into Shadow in 1911, Juliet Nicolson

Travel As a Political Act, Rick Steves

The Lincolns in the White House: Four Years That Shattered a Family, Jerrold M. Packard

King, Kaiser, Tsar: Three Royal Cousins Who Led the World to War, Catrine Clay

Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, Nelson D. Lankford

Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, Francine Prose

The Day We Found the Universe, Marcia Bartusiak

About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, Ben Yagoda

Bossypants, Tina Fey

Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter, Randy L. Schmidt

Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Royal Marriage, Gyles Brandreth

Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh

Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, 1910-1962, Nigel Nicolson

A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown, Julia Scheeres

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Glenn Frankel

The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Anne-Marie O'Connor

The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah," Alan Light

A Sting in the Tale: My Adventures with Bumblebees, Dave Goulson

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Sheri Fink

One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson

The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, Paula Byrne

Digging for Richard III: The Search for the Lost King, Mike Pitts

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, Claire Harman

The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule

Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President, Betty Caroli

Also-rans, fiction.

Looking back over my ten years of reading lists, there are many, many 4-star books. That's probably the largest category. And if I were to go back and re-read some of them, some would probably become 5-star books. And vice-versa.

These are some of the fiction books I rated with 4 stars. I've picked the ones that really stand out in my mind as special and memorable, even years later.

The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
Water For Elephants, Sara Gruen
The Art of Detection, Laurie R. King
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Those Who Save Us, Jenna Blum
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Under the Dome, Stephen King
Ahab's Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Dissolution, C.J. Sansom
Dark Fire, C.J. Sansom
Sovereign, C.J. Sansom
Revelation, C.J.Sansom
Homeland, Barbara Hambly
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame-Smith
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
11/22/63, Stephen King
The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The House Next Door, Anne Rivers Siddons
Stettin Station, David Downing
The Rose Garden, Susanna Kearsley
Needful Things, Stephen King
How It All Began, Penelope Lively
The Blue Castle, L.M. Montgomery
Atonement, Iam McEwan
Little Dorrit, Charles DIckens
Harvest Home, Thomas Tryon
Brat Farrar, Josephine Tey
The Ivy Tree, Mary Stewart
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller
The End-of-the-World Running Club, Adrian J. Walker
Lincoln, Gore Vidal
The Anchoress, Robin Cadwallader

Items of note: 

The four books by C.J. Sansom are the first four in his Matthew Shardlake series, about a crippled lawyer in Tudor England. Sansom really captures the fear and dread of living in the time when Henry VIII was embarking on the destruction of the Catholic Church in England.

Brat Farrar and The Ivy Tree appear next to each other in the order I read them...Tey's story came first, and Mary Stewart wrote her own gender-swapped version a few years later. This is a tale of assumed identity and inheritance, lots of fun in both versions.

Five-star Non-fiction.

I read more non-fiction than fiction, and I generally enjoy it more, too. (There is SO MUCH bad fiction out there!) As my list shows, I like historical non-fiction and biographies/memoirs. Here are my five-star non-fiction reads from 2007-2016.

My Life in France, Julia Child
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great
American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Amy Tan
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, Maureen Corrigan
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton: The First Domestic Goddess, Kathryn Hughes
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, Aaron Lansky
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, Tony Hurwitz
Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His
Greatness, Joshua Wolf Shenk
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt
Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World, Lawrence Goldstone
The Children's Blizzard, David Laskin
One For the Road: An Outback Adventure, Tony Hurwitz
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, Tony Hurwitz
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Karen Armstrong
Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, Karen Armstrong
Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, Tony Perrottet
The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, Daniel Mendelsohn
Mornings on Horseback, David McCullough
The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany, Martin Goldsmith
Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, Alex von Tunzelmann
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, Lucette Lagnado
Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden, Quentin Bell
Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, John Matteson
Everybody Was So Young: A Lost Generation Love Story, Amanda Vaill
Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose
109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, Jennet Conant
The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Edward Dolnick
As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, Joan Reardon
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, Adam Hochschild
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, Kevin Roose
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, Laura
Hillenbrand
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson
The Island At the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America , Russell Shorto
Talking With My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes, and Other Kitchen Stories, Bonny Wolf
Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller's Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood, Ellen F. Brown
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale
Martha Washington: First Lady of Liberty, Helen Bryan
Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, Andrea Wulf
Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr and the International Hunt for His Assassin, Hampton Sides
You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death and Other Humiliations, Michael Ian Black
Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Barbara Demick
Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel
Clemens, Andrew Beahrs
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, Peter Guralnick
Under a Wing: A Memoir, Reeve Lindbergh
My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, Ariel Sabar
Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, Keith Lowe
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Lawrence Wright
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, Candice Millard
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, Candice Millard
Johnny Cash: The Life, Robert Hilburn
The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra, Helen Rappaport
The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
Sinatra: The Chairman, James Kaplan
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Erik Larson
Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World, Matthew Goodman
Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, S.C. Gwynne
Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War, Annia Ciezadlo
Tea With Jane Austen, Kim Wilson
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Daniel James Brown
I Must Say: My Life As a Humble Comedy Legend, Martin Short
So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, Maureen Corrigan
Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife, Gioia Diliberto
How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman
The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, Paul Collins
Jane Austen's Country Life, Deirdre Le Faye
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride, Daniel James Brown
Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, Laura Ingalls Wilder
Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, Kate Clifford Larson
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin

Five-Star Fiction.

As this year comes to an end, I am also coming to the end of a 10-year period of recording every book I read. I started in January 2007, and it has been a really fun and rewarding pastime--and helpful, too, as I become more forgetful about what I have and haven't read!

I want to spend the next few days talking about the stats and details of what I have read in ten years' time. I record my books at GoodReads, and while I don't review them, I do rate them on their five-star system.

I am really picky about the fiction I read. And I read a lot of disappointing fiction. So for me to give a book five stars...it has to be wonderful. Now I have to say that some of these books have really stuck with me over the years, and others are barely memorable to me now. But I felt "five-star-ish" about each one of these when I finished it!

Here are my five-star fiction books from 2007-2016.

March, Geraldine Brooks
The Emancipator's Wife, Barbara Hambly
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Broooks
First Among Sequels, Jasper Fforde
Thus Was Adonis Murdered, Sarah Caudwell
The Shortest Way to Hades, Sarah Caudwell
The Sirens Sang of Murder, Sarah Caudwell
The Sibyl in Her Grave, Sarah Caudwell
Above Suspicion, Helen MacInnes
Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank
The Constant Princess, Philippa Gregory
River of Darkness, Rennie Airth
Moloka'i, Alan Brennert
The Widow's War, Sally Cabot Gunning
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
City of Shadows, Ariana Franklin
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Marvels, Kurt Busiek
Alice I Have Been, Melanie Benjamin
Queen Lucia, E. F. Benson
What Alice Forgot, Liane Moriarty
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King
The Shining, Stephen King
The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
Doc, Mary Doria Russell
The Cuckoo's Calling, Robert Galbraith
The Husband's Secret, Liane Moriarty
The End of the Wasp Season, Denise Mina
Crow Lake, Mary Lawson
The Aviator's Wife, Melanie Benjamin
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce
The Hypnotist's Love Story, Liane Moriarty
The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman
The Center of Everything, Laura Moriarty
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
Mind of Winter, Laura Kasischke
Those Who Wish Me Dead, Michael Koryta
The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Duel: Terror Stories, Richard Matheson
Endless Night, Agatha Christie
The Girl With All the Gifts, M.R. Carey
Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty
The Song of Hartgrove Hall, Natasha Solomons
The Swans of Fifth Avenue, Melanie Benjamin
Ross Poldark, Winston Graham
 The Wild Girl, Kate Forsyth
 Descent, Tim Johnston
 Miller's Valley, Anna Quindlen

Items of note:
The four books by Sarah Caudwell are, sadly, the first and only four books of her Hilary Tamar mystery series. She passed away before she could write more. If you are an Anglophile, if you like wordy, smart-alecky protagonists, and if you secretly think you're smarter than most of those around you...this is a series you will enjoy.

Betty book.

I had to run into the library this morning to pick up a book I'd requested, and I stopped to look at the Friends of the Library sale rack just inside the front door.

I never really noticed this rack before--it's in an awkward place between the door and the metal detectors--and I think if I ever did glance at it, it was just a cursory "James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, yeahyeahyeah" kind of glance.

A few weeks ago, I went in with my father-in-law and he stopped at the rack right away and found something he wanted. So now I'm noticing it more.

Today I found this for a buck:

I thought maybe there was a nice dust jacket under that paper bag cover, but alas no. So it's not an awesome find, but I am a sucker for old Betty Crocker books. I have a ring-bound Picture Cookbook (the edition before this one) and I have a hardback cookbook from the 60s that's the same edition my mom had in ring-bound when I was a kid. I used to love to pore over the pictures, and it has some excellent recipes for pound cake and oatmeal cookies, among other things. I have a Betty Crocker Cooky Book from the early 1970s, too. I just love the bright pictures in old cookbooks...they're too bright in a vaguely unappetizing way.

You know, you just don't see radish roses any more, and I think that's a darn shame.

These are the Betty Crocker test kitchens of the 1950's. They tested "new and glamorous" recipes in the Kitchen of Tomorrow...wonder what those would have been? Cheese fondue? Pizza rolls? Sushi?

This link shows the different Betty cookbooks over the ages (if you scroll down a tad.) The first red one is the one I have in ring-bound. The second one is the one I picked up today--that's what the jacket would have looked like. The third one is one I have salivated over on Ebay more than once. And the fourth one is the one my mom had in ring-bound and I have in hardcover.

Beyond those years, I think the editions are not as cute. I have a Better Homes and Gardens book to represent the 80s and beyond--it was a wedding present to me in 1992. Love that one, too--I always have to check it every time I make hard-boiled eggs, as I don't seem to be able to keep the procedure in my head. It's very useful, but it's not as charming as the old books with their ultra-bright pictures.

This book that I found today is in really nice shape, a few places where the spine is cleaved, but the pages are clean. I always hope for handwritten recipes tucked into these old cookbooks, but no such luck with this one. There's only one page that looks worn and has some liquid damage. It has recipes for cottage pudding with vanilla, lemon, chocolate or nutmeg sauce; cinnamon fluff; cherry carnival; and Iowa date pudding. I wonder which one was the family favorite? Upon reading, it looks like "cottage pudding" is just a plain white cake baked in a 9" pan. That sounds much more appetizing than "cottage pudding," which made me think of steamed cottage cheese.

Orson Scott Card.

Todd and I went to hear his favorite author, Orson Scott Card, speak at Christopher Newport University last night. Card has written approximately a bajillion books, most of which Todd owns. Todd's favorite is Ender's Game, which was the first book he gave me to read while we were dating. I'm not a particular fan of Card's, but I have read four or five of his books, and liked a couple of them, but science fiction is just not my genre. Card has also written some historical novels about Biblical women and the early Mormon church, of which he's a member.

Card is great at public speaking; he's taught writing classes and lectured for years, so he has his repertoire of funny stories well-polished and he had the audience in the palm of his hand. It took me a little longer to warm up to him because he crapped all over my very favorite childhood book in the first three minutes of his talk! I was shooting eye daggers at him, but he was oblivious to their power. (The book was Julie Andrews' Mandy--he also crapped all over her acting ability. Card is an opinionated guy.)

Since his first young adult novel is coming out next month, the rough topic was writing for children--is it different from writing for adults? Should it be different? Card's argument was "no," and he launched into a list of books he loved as a child to help prove his point, books that were not written explicitly for children but which children have often loved for decades. This was where I started to warm back up to him, because it's obvious that he was a voracious--and precocious--child reader, and I was, too.

He remarked on the way that children sift through the themes and topics that are over their heads and just zero in on the story, and the way that children often learn new words, but not how to pronounce them, so that years later they learn they've been mispronouncing it all along, which was certainly true of me and of Todd, and many other kids I know who were reading well above their grade level.

His point was that a dedicated reading child can sift through a lot of what he called "twaddle," that adults won't put up with, because kids want a good story above all else and haven't learned to become impatient and jaded about books. And I know that was true of me--I vacuumed it all up, good and bad, when I was a kid.

But of course, what kids most need is a good story, just as adults are looking for a good story. He made an interesting comment that even people who don't read are still looking for stories, that we all seek out stories, even if it's just in gossiping with our friends. We all want to know what makes people act the way they do and some of us find that in books, some in other places. And children not only want to find out what makes other people act the way they do, but also what makes them who they are, and who they might turn into.

So it was a fun lecture. I love hearing people talk about books they loved as children. I just love hearing people talk about books, period. He took questions from the audience afterwards, and that led to more discussion of his own writing and his own books, which Todd particularly liked. Then there was a book-signing, and although Todd did bring his battered paperback of Ender's Game (price on the cover: $3.50!) we were far back in the line and calculated it would take at least two hours to reach the front. So we took off. I suspect Todd will begin re-reading his Card collection once again--but we were both amused that a writer who is so opinionated about other people's bad writing was responsible for one of the worst books either of us has ever read, the execrable Empire. I guess we all have our blind spots!

Bookshelf.

I moved around my study a couple of months ago, and found some extra wall room for a small bookshelf. I'd been wanting a small shelf for my childhood books, which have been in boxes in the closet for several years.

But I couldn't find one anywhere! I wanted something nicer than the pressed-board things you get at Wal-Mart and screw together with an Allen wrench. I found a perfect shelf at a consignment shop, but they wanted about three times what it was worth. So Todd said he'd make me one.

While I was out of town this past weekend, he finished it up for me. But it was too nice to hide on a wall in my study! So I placed it at the end of our long upstairs hallway, and it looks like it was made just for that spot--even though it wasn't.

And all my books fit on it, with room for a few knick-knacks. Todd used these tiny brass screws at the joints, which I think look wonderful.

Thanks, creative husband of mine! Love you!

Rediscovering the library.

I was so disappointed when we moved to southern Virginia seven years ago and I got a good look at the library systems here, first the county system where we first lived, and then the city system where we live now.

I moved here from Columbus, Ohio, a city and a state which both devoted a lot of attention and money toward their libraries. (Granted, this was in the prosperous 1990's--things may be different now in Ohio.) I worked for a while at one of the branch libraries in the Columbus system, a brand-new building with a vast "new books" section, gorgeous wooden bookshelves, high spacious ceilings, a fireplace and cozy seating area--and of course, access to all the books in all the other Columbus branches--millions of books just a day or two away, once requested. And since I worked there, picking up my requested books was simply part of my routine.

We had two libraries close by our home--one was also part of the Columbus system, and was extensively renovated while we lived there, and the other closest library was part of a village system, but a wealthy village with lots of money to throw at its library. That particular library has been renovated twice in the past fifteen years--it's basically a mall with books at this point.

It upset me probably more than it should have, moving to a place where libraries seem more like an afterthought than a prominent community feature. I've mentioned my current library before--a small, squat, dark place whose most interesting feature is that it's named after astronaut Gus Grissom.

Not that I'm opposed to small libraries, necessarily...while I was in college in Marietta, Ohio, I was a regular user of the Washington County public library on Fifth Street. It was a small, old building that smelled like dusty paper. I'd walk there from campus to get my required dose of murder mysteries and other non-college related reading material. Because it was old, it had that hushed, sacred, echoing quality that modern libraries can't quite achieve.

We also had a small old library in Columbiana, Ohio, which was my beloved childhood library, tucked behind the high school on a bumpy brick-paved street. The steps down to the children's section in the basement were blood-red linoleum, narrow, slippery, steep, dark. (Obviously pre-Americans with Disabilities Act.) Every two weeks I would drag a bulging bookbag up the steps and out to the car. My mom would make me write a list of all my books the minute I got home, to try to avoid the ordeal of lost books and fines, which could run into some serious money with a kid who brought home as many books as I did. (That library was torn down years ago, and there's a nice, safe [boring] one-story modern library in a different neighborhood now.)

But the Grissom library in Newport News is small and charmless. It was built out of cement in that decade of architectural shame known as the 1970s. The new books section is sad and sparse. The building doesn't smell of old paper but of damp plastic carpet. And the library workers can be on the surly side. I go there once a year or so, and then I go home, missing Ohio.

But there must be some sort of belated homing instinct deep in my brain, like with swallows or pigeons, because about a month ago, I felt this deep desire to go to the library. For the past three years, I've been using Paperback Swap to fill my book needs (along with occasional trips to Borders) and although I love Paperback Swap passionately, there were books that I just wasn't able to find there, or that were so heavily wishlisted that it would be three more years before I'd work my way to the top of the list for them.

So I printed off a list of books I was looking for and spent some time clicking at the library card catalog computer and lo and behold--I found a lot of them. Not all by any means, but a lot. I brought home a stack, and went back a few days later to pick up another stack that I'd requested from the two or three other libraries in the city system.

I read through most of those (this all coincided with a 100-degree heat wave--good indoor reading weather) and went back two weeks later and brought home (and requested) two more big stacks. This time I also ventured into inter-library loan, which is not a service I've made much use of before, since I'm a person who tends to want books NOW.

I found that the library shelves and seating areas have been rearranged a bit, for a more open feel, which has greatly reduced the claustrophobic feeling. And I've found that early evening visits are the best--there are fewer people and more of a quiet bustle during that time, which is very soothing.

So far this has been the great satisfaction of my summer--bringing home big stacks of library books. The feeling reminds me so much of childhood summers, and that adds an extra layer of pleasure to it. All I would need to do is turn off the air conditioning and plop down on a blanket in front of a box fan with my newest read, and it would be like time traveling! (But I'm not turning off the a/c, not even to time travel!)

More book stuff.

I was going to run some errands this morning, but as the snow is falling again and accumulating far beyond what the weather people said it would, I guess I'll stay home and not risk the chaos out there.

Kim asked what I've been reading, so here's a rough list of things...

I read a mystery called The White Garden by Stephanie Barron, who writes a pretty good mystery series about Jane Austen that I used to read. This is a stand-alone novel about what may have really happened after Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and waded into the river in 1941. It was pretty good (I have found Barron to be a consistently "pretty good" writer) and it got me interested in Virginia Woolf and her friend/lover Vita-Sackville-West, and also the gardens at Sissinghurst, Vita's home, as I mentioned before.

So I had a copy of Mrs. Dalloway from the the thrift store around here, and I picked that up. I was an English major in college, and yet I never read any Virginia Woolf, not even "A Room of Her Own," which I think is supposed to be mandatory for English majors with a women's studies emphasis!

I had tried to read Mrs. Dalloway once or twice before and never gotten past the first page or two before getting distracted, but I must have just been in the perfect frame of mind, because I floated right through it and thought it was terrific.

Vita Sackville-West also intrigued me from her characterization in The White Garden, so I ordered one of her novels from Paperback Swap and read it: All Passion Spent. Sackville-West was nowhere near the kind of writer that Woolf was, but it was still an excellent story of an elderly woman whose husband dies and who astounds her children and grandchildren by taking charge of her life for the very first time. It was a quick, good read. There aren't many of Sackville-West's books in print any more, but I'd like to find a few more to sample.

Vita Sackville-West had a very long and interesting marriage to a man named Harold Nicholson, who worked for the diplomatic service in Great Britain. They fell in love and married right before the first World War, but their marriage was severely strained several years later when Vita had her first affair with another woman. This story is told in their son Nigel Nicholson's book Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold spent almost forty more years together after this crisis, but never shared a bed again, she sleeping with other women and the occasional man, he sleeping with other men. And yet they were devoted to each other and to their homes and gardens. It's a pretty interesting story, to say the least.

I am a total Anglophile, and books that take place around the First World War through the Second World War are always interesting to me. Someone on the Paperback Swap forums (have I mentioned how much I love that site?!) brought up an author named E.F. Benson, who was a prolific writer, but who is most famous today for six novels he wrote about a woman named Emmeline Lucas (called "Lucia" by her friends) who rules the small town she lives in with an iron fist. The first Lucia book (Queen Lucia) was written in 1920, and you wouldn't think a 90-year-old book could be so wickedly funny, but it is. I've read the first three books and have the second three on order...I don't even know how to describe them except to say that if you find British sitcoms funny, you will probably find these books funny. Nobody is better at poking fun at people's pretensions than the British.

I finally got 84, Charing Cross Road from my Paperback Swap wish list...I had seen part of the movie on TV a month or so ago, so I knew how it ended, but I still enjoyed the book. It's a very quick read, a little story told in letters between a New York writer named Helene Hanff and the used bookstore in England where she orders books. The letters span a 20-year period. It made me very nostalgic for a time when you could stick a couple of bucks in an envelope and get antique books from London!

Somehow I got interested in reading Shirley Jackson, and I can't remember how. Many people had to read her short story "The Lottery" in junior high or high school--it's her most famous work by far. I heard somewhere about her last book We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and requested it for Christmas, and read it all on Christmas evening, which was a creepy way to end a holiday. It is one of the oddest books I have ever read, but it sticks with you--the story of two sisters who live in a big house with their deranged uncle, as told by the younger sister Merricat. Read it, it's good.

Then a couple weeks ago I picked up Jackson's other novel, The Haunting of Hill House, which was also very good. For people who are jaded by years of violent horror films, this book might not make much of an impact, but if you are an imaginative sort of person who doesn't even like to sit through scary movie previews, you'll get quite a few pleasurable spine chills from the story. It, too, has stuck with me...Jackson had a real talent for setting a scene and adding details that made it come to life and feel very real to the reader.

Shirley Jackson spent her early career writing the kind of domestic humor that a lot of women writers were stuck writing in the late 40s and through the 60s--stories about absent-minded husbands and adorable but cantankerous children. I found her best-known of this type of book, Life Among the Savages, and read it a few days ago. After reading her dark, spooky fiction, this light-hearted story of her four children and her family's move to an old house in Vermont hardly seems like it could be written by the same person at first glance, but I could see in it some of her same careful prose and even a few dark bits peeping out here and there.

I am really eager to get Jackson's biography--it's on my wish list at Paperback Swap--and find out more about her. She died in her mid-forties, from too much food, alcohol and pills--certainly the flip side of the light-hearted wife and mom she portrayed in her humor books, and more in keeping with the haunted women in her short stories and novels.

So that's a bit of what I've been reading the past few weeks. And I just keep finding more and more and more...!

Book stuff.

This is the year I turn forty, and even though it doesn't happen until October, I am already wrestling with it hard.

One of the many anxieties that has crossed my mind related to turning forty is silly, but very much a part of the "time running out" feeling I've been wrestling with, and that is--so many books to read, so little time. Which is a cliche, but like most cliches, all too true!

I've always been a voracious reader, but I hopped and skipped along, reading this and that, or not reading anything new for a few weeks here or there...and I often bemoaned the fact that I had "nothing to read." Lately, I've been feeling more and more breathless, looking at the stacks of books to be read, and finding new books to add to the stacks almost every day. I've gone from famine to feast, especially since I joined Paperback Swap and started trading for books I never would have found otherwise.

I watched a BBC miniseries of "Bleak House" this week on Netflix, and decided to read the book, which I was pretty sure I had tucked away on a shelf upstairs. I dug around and found A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, which I've read; and David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, which I haven't gotten to yet, but no Bleak House.

Providentially, Borders sent me a coupon in this morning's e-mail, so I printed it off and took myself to Borders, where I did find a copy of Bleak House and heaved it down off the top shelf. Let's just say this is a daunting-looking book. Even in paperback, it weighs a ton. It's 800-some pages long--and tiny type! I have a feeling this book may take me through my fortieth birthday and beyond.

In the past few months I've been finding all sorts of new topics and new authors, with an emphasis on early 20th-century fiction and history. I've read bits of Dorothy Parker and Shirley Jackson, Virginia Woolf and Vita-Sackville-West. I've read about Bohemians in England and the Lost Generation and the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle. Every topic and every author washes up against each other and overlaps and there's always more threads to follow and more people to find out about. It's a little overwhelming.

I've also changed my method of reading lately. I'm using bookmarks! I've always been a dog-earer and a plopping-open-face-down reader, but after ruining a couple of perfectly good books by plopping them face-down onto unseen table and counter stains, I decided to invest in a couple of tassled bookmarks. They have an added bonus in that you can play with the tassel while you read.

Maybe it's just a winter kind of feeling, and once the sun comes back out and there's more to do outside, I'll lose this urgency that is making me feel like I should have a book in front of me at all times. But right now, I feel like a squirrel stashing nuts--except it's books and they take up way more room.

Two Boys and a Tree.

My dad works at a school, and when I was a kid, he often brought home discards from the school library to help meet my insatiable book needs. At that time, the school was eliminating many of its reading textbooks from the 1940s and 50s, so I got to enjoy them at home, and ended up with a deep and long-lasting fondness for the artwork and stories of that era.

There was a reader that I really loved when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. I saved many of my childhood books, but somehow that one fell through the cracks and got lost. As an adult, all I could really remember about it was that a) it was a dark blue cloth-bound reader; b) it was about a tree; and c) it took place over the course of seasons and eventually, years. I didn't even remember the title, and all the other details were hazy at best. I just remembered loving it.

Every time I have gone into a used bookstore, antique mall, or flea market in the past 20 years, I have looked for that book, never really believing I would find it. But I think I found it today!


It was on a shelf under a row of gorgeous Cherry Ames books that I'd been salivating over. I saw the cover and a very tiny bell rang far off in the recesses of my brain.

I picked it up and paged through it. It's the story of Lee and Bill and an apple tree on the farm outside their town. The town is growing. The boys spend several bucolic seasons climbing the tree to look at birds' nests, eating apples, and sledding down the hill below the tree.


But progress is unstoppable. The farm is sold, a park and a zoo are built around the tree, and a whole city is constructed on what used to be the farm. Years later, Lee and Bill bring their own kids to visit the park and zoo, and to see the old apple tree.



It all sounds very familiar. It's been so many years that I can't swear for sure that this is the book I was looking for, and yet it seems impossible that it isn't. I was fascinated with stories that showed the passing of time--I was also a huge fan of The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, which showed a similar process happening around an old country house.

The book is in decent shape, but awfully musty-smelling--I think it sat in a very damp basement for a very long time--but it was cheap and it was so unexpected to find it! Sometimes when I look through used books, I have that book in my mind, but I wasn't even thinking about it today. That made the discovery all the more delightful!

Clara's Kitchen.

A year or two ago, a couple of Youtube videos were making the rounds on all the forums and e-mail lists--a 90-something-year-old woman named Clara Cannucciari, filmed in her kitchen by her grandson, cooking some of the meals that her family ate during the Depression years.

Here you can see her making Egg Drop Soup...here she cooks a concoction called Poor Man's Meal...here's the first "episode" where she makes Pasta with Peas. There are quite a few short Clara segments on Youtube now, and they're all charming and fascinating.

Armed with some birthday money, a coupon and some Borders Bucks, I went to Borders in search of something great the other night and found that Clara has a small book out called Clara's Kitchen, with recipes for some of the simple foods her family lived on in the Thirties, as well as some matter-of-fact memories of her life in those days.

I just couldn't resist this book. It makes me wish I had taken more time to talk to my grandmothers about their lives during those years. The stories and the pictures are so simple and yet so powerful. She writes about picking dandelion greens in the yard and mushrooms in vacant lots for dinner, eating eggplant burgers since meat was so scarce, and waiting for her dad to bring home half of his lunchtime ham sandwich for her and her brother to devour. She also writes about having to drop out of high school in her sophomore year because her family could not afford to support a child who could be out working and bringing in money.

Clara's cheerfulness and pragmatism come through on every page. This is a strong woman. You might not want to make every recipe in the book (I wrinkled up my nose at Panecotto--stale bread in milk) but you'll want to read every story. Loved it!

Sunday ramblings.

Ah, what a lovely day for cleaning out the linen closet! Which is what I did this morning. Also sorted Todd's clothes, and dusted our bedroom. I guess I'm in fall nesting mode. I sorted out a bunch of books for disposal on Friday...it's truly scary when a person can remove 150 books from her shelves and it isn't really a noticeable difference. Yikes.

Todd is pressure-washing the house in preparation for some trim painting later this fall. And after my burst of activity this morning, I'm hanging out in my study pondering fall craft projects and cruising the Internet and chatting with my cousin Roland on Facebook. And blogging.

Tomorrow it will be eight weeks since my surgery and I'm doing just great. I have a haphazard method of taping up my incisions as recommended by the plastic surgeon, and massaging the incisions with Palmer's Vitamin E lotion, as recommended by the nurses at the breast health forum I read. Hopefully the combination of the two methods will result in a reduction of the Frankenstein effect I'm sporting right now.

Other than the tape/massage, and still not doing any strenuous lifting or tugging, I am completely back to normal and working on losing some more weight. Baking pumpkin scones and cinnamon rolls is not contributing to that effort much, but those are things that feed the soul, so I'm making allowances for them, at least until my Tuesday weigh-in when I can see how much harm they've done!

One unforeseen, and slightly frustrating, element of my reduction is that very few of my old clothes fit well--but now that I am raring to buy some new clothes, there is nothing in the stores that remotely appeals to me. In fact, the last few places I've looked, the fall fashions have been actively hideous, like the designer was trying to offend the eye on purpose! So I'm waiting it out. Sooner or later I'll find something I like, and till then, I'll just keep trying to go down another size.

My friend Beverly has started writing a column for a local news site. She's covering mortgage information right now, but hopes to branch out into other topics. There are tons of articles on the site, on every topic you can imagine. She's an excellent writer--go check her out!

I re-read a very sweet book from my childhood this week called Miracles on Maple Hill. I know I read it back in the day, but I had almost no memory of the story as I re-read it. It has a tremendous amount of detail about the natural world, especially wildflowers, and it made me feel a little bit sad to think how few people today would have the wealth of information about the natural world that the kindly neighbor in the book, Mr. Chris, has, and that he imparts to the main character, ten-year-old Marly.

What made me even sadder is the thought of how few people have the opportunity to amass such knowledge--the knowledge that comes from living in a place your whole life, and that your parents and grandparents lived in, and having their knowledge in your bones as well. Mr. Chris is out every day walking through the fields and forests and observing and working in the natural world. When the book was written 50 years ago, it was already an endangered lifestyle...now it seems almost archaic.

Fall seems to be truly here-some days are quite warm, but that breathless, sweltering humid feeling is gone now. And the nights--and most days--are cool enough to have the windows open again. This time of year is so wonderful in Virginia.

Off to make some turkey meatloaf for dinner.

Home Cooking.

One of the unfortunate things about starting your blog way back in the ancient days of Blogger is that all the nifty new features are inapplicable to your old template. For instance, I love the feature on newer blogs where you can attach identifiers and categories to each post, thereby making it easy for you and your readers to find topics related to home, or thrifting, or cooking, or whatever you write about. But I have not been able to find the courage to try to do a template change on four years' worth of writing, lest something dreadful happen.

So for that reason, I can't remember, and don't feel like sorting through four years of posts to find out, whether I have ever mentioned Laurie Colwin here before.

I have a very pleasant memory of discovering Laurie Colwin...it was my junior year of college and I was at the mall at home on a break, browsing through the bargain rack in front of Waldenbooks.

[I have a pleasant memory of the Waldenbooks, too, as it was the first bookstore I ever visited, thanks to my aunt Charlotte,who gave me a gift certificate for my 8th birthday--an event that looms very large in my life.]

So in the bargain rack was a hardback copy of Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen, which is a collection of columns Colwin, a novelist, wrote for Gourmet magazine. A couple weeks ago, I wrote about E.B. White and his wife and their writing style, and I think Colwin's style falls into the same category: erudite, straightforward, deceptively simple, gently opinionated.

I'll never forget reading Colwin's description of cooking in her first New York apartment which was the size of a box of animal crackers, as I believe she described it, while sitting in my dorm room, which had roughly the same dimensions (plus a sheet strung on a rope across the middle to divide my roommate's half from my half--this was our third year rooming together and the thrill was gone.) Whenever I picture her apartment, I see my dorm room. I read and re-read that book, just for the enjoyment of her voice and the images she evoked.

A few years later, Todd and I were living in Idaho Falls, Idaho, which at that time had no real bookstore. (It was a great day indeed when the Barnes and Noble finally went in on the edge of town.) We would drive down to Salt Lake City, four hours away, every now and then, to shop and to hit a few excellent independent bookstores. At one of these bookstores, I was completely surprised and delighted to find a paperback copy of More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen. This was in the dark ages B.I. (Before Internet) when it was a lot harder to find out about new releases and what a writer was up to, so I had no idea the book was out there.

I got a bad feeling when I opened up the book and the copyright page said "the Estate of Laurie Colwin." I flipped to the back and saw that she had passed away the year before, in her late forties, of a heart attack.

Since then, I've read several other people's descriptions of finding out about her death, and it made me feel perversely better to know I wasn't the only reader out there feeling bereft. So this book, although also a joy to read, was tinged with melancholy, reading Colwin's loving descriptions of her small daughter, and knowing how little time she had with her.

Ever since I found that first book, I have been trying to find a food essayist who hits the same notes as Colwin, and I have yet to find one. The last couple of years have seen an explosion of food- and cooking-related memoirs, and I was looking through a few at the bookstore today, and I had my usual thought--they're just not as good as Laurie. I can't describe what it is I love about her writing. I wonder if part of the pleasure I find is just remembering the places and times where I read her books for the first time: on the bed in my tiny dorm room in Ohio, in the front seat of my Nissan Pathfinder in Utah.

Anyway, if you're drawn to any sort of foodie writing, Colwin is the momma of it all, and you should check her out.

Anne's birthday.

When I was ten or eleven, I came across a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank somewhere, and read it eagerly. I don't think I knew much about World War II or the Holocaust at that age--the story of Anne's family hiding away in a secret hiding place seemed more like an exciting adventure to me at that age.

I'll never forget the feeling I had when I reached the end of the book and read the little afterword, which said very simply that the family was caught in August 1944, and that Anne had died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945--just a few weeks before it was liberated. It felt like I'd been punched in the chest and had to catch my breath.

I felt like I'd lost a friend. I still feel that way. I've re-read Anne's diary several times since then, and more recently read the revised critical edition which contains bits and pieces her father omitted from the original. Reading it as an adult, I was struck by her amazing writing skill and the places her thoughts ranged to, as she sat in that tiny nest of rooms trying to be quiet all day long, day after day. What seemed like an adventure to my child's mind, I now understood as the nightmare it really was.

Today would be Anne's 80th birthday, if she had survived the war years and all the years since then. But instead she died at age 15. What a tremendous life she could have had. But she did something tremendous with the life she was given, and I'm grateful for that. After reading her diary, I developed an interest in the war, the Holocaust, and Judaism that is still part of my life today. Her words started it all, and they are such a gift.

Onward and upward.

On Sunday, Todd made plans to play 18 holes of golf in Williamsburg with his boss and a couple of co-workers, so I went along and dropped him off at the ritzy country club golf course, and took myself off to the antique mall.

The Williamsburg antique mall is a hit-or-miss affair--I have walked out of there with treasures before, but not often, and not cheaply. This time I found something lovely AND cheap at one of the used-book vendors' booths.

The title caught my eye, but so did the author's name, because I was pretty sure she was E. B. White's wife, which she was.

I can't overstate how much I love and admire E. B. White. If he'd only ever written Charlotte's Web, that would be reason enough to adore him, but he also spent many decades writing short essays for The New Yorker, and I have two of the published collections of these, which I dip into every now and then for a breath of sanity, humanity and perfect prose.

Katharine, his wife, is a shadowy figure in the background of many of his short pieces, but in this book we get to hear her own voice. She was an editor at The New Yorker for years, and wrote fourteen garden pieces for the magazine, which her husband collected and published in this book after her death.

He wrote the foreword for the book, describing Katharine's love for gardening even at the end of her life, and the final paragraph is typical of his careful but powerful style:

As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion [the arrival of new spring bulbs to plant]--the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

I flipped through the book, curious to hear what Katharine's writing voice sounded like, and wasn't terribly surprised to be totally charmed by this random paragraph:

I have read somewhere that no Japanese child will instinctively pick a flower, not even a very young child attracted by its bright color, because the sacredness of flowers is so deeply imbued in the culture of Japan that its children understand the blossoms are there to look at, not to pluck. Be that as it may, my observation is that Occidental children do have this instinctive desire, and I feel certain that almost every American must have a favorite childhood memory of picking flowers--dandelions on a lawn, perhaps, or daisies and buttercups in a meadow, trailing arbutus on a cold New England hillside in spring, a bunch of sweet peas in a hot July garden after admonishments from an adult to cut the stems long, or, when one had reached the age of discretion and could be trusted to choose the right rose and cut its stem correctly, a rosebud for the breakfast table.

Does anyone write that well any more? Seriously? We've lost the formal tone that used to mark professional writers in magazines and newspapers, and now we're all communicating at blogger level, which is fine for us common schmoes out here, but I miss the days when reporters and writers had--the only word I can think of is "gravitas." Like Walter Cronkite, who is always the person I think of when I hear the word "gravitas."

They chose their words carefully and you felt you could trust what they said because they'd worked hard on it, re-worked it, thought about the best words that would say exactly what they meant. Now everybody's just trying to fill cable TV space, Internet space and newspaper/magazine space (for however much longer those will be around) with words, any words, no matter how stupid, obvious, ignorant or hateful.

However, that's a rant for another day. I'm looking forward to sampling this pretty book with the foxed pages and finding out why Katharine loved to garden and how she felt about garden catalogs and lawns and different kinds of roses. The paragraph I quoted above made me smile, because a sizable percentage of the photos of me in the first four or five years of my life feature me clutching flowers in my little hand or poking through the flower garden in search of something to pick. Which I do not think endeared me to my grandfather, whose garden I believe it was, but flowers still make me very happy.

I love the title of the book, too, it's so hopeful. I know I've mentioned before my love/hate relationship with gardening, and my constant search for confidence and some sort of zen attitude toward the whole thing. Time moves onward, the plants--and weeds--grow upward. I've started to glimpse the lessons in this process, but it still eludes me most of the time.

Afternoon mumblings.

Do you get grumpy in the afternoons? From about 3:00 till about 6:00, I just feel dreadful most days. I know part of it is a blood sugar problem, but even with a snack, I still feel so out-of-sorts. Even when I start out the day in a fabulous mood, by 3:00 life looks ever so bleak.

I LOVE the picture on this blog today. I wish I could go back in time and take a road trip in a big old car and stay in little tourist camps and get an ice-cold Coke at a gas station like that. The photo makes me think of a fave childhood book called Judy's Journey by Lois Lenski, written in that same era. Judy's family were migrant farm workers that traveled all over the southern U.S.--not a luxury road trip, but it was fun to read about all the different places they stayed. I love books and movies that deal with road trips..."National Lampoon's Vacation," "Harold and Kumar," Blue Highways...I know I'm forgetting lots.

I baked my first successful loaves of wheat bread yesterday and I'm still basking in the glow of achievement. I am so sick of nasty store-bought bread that tastes like chemicals. I tried a recipe from my King Arthur Flour baking book last week, but I think the yeast was too old--it rose, but not a lot. It was also sweetened with molasses, which was too overpowering. And it weighed about ten pounds.

I will try that recipe again with fresher yeast and maybe some honey instead of molasses, but for my second attempt I tried this recipe: Kid-Friendly Wheat Bread. That worked much better. I'm mostly looking for a bread that will serve as a good delivery vehicle for homemade lemon curd, and this fits the bill admirably.

Next I think I'll take on my mom's wheat crescent/cinnamon roll recipe--you can use the dough for either crescents or cinnamons, and it tastes awesome either way. Can't wait to try!

I'm starting to think the sun has gone away forever. It's absolutely bizarre to have so many cloudy days here. I went out to clean out the car this afternoon and ran the battery down listening to the radio while I cleaned. I thought a car battery had more juice than that--I barely got started! And oh, is it a sty. I am embarrassed to have people travel in it with me. So I'll tackle the rest tomorrow and maybe (fingers crossed) there will be a little sunlight to clean by?

Checking in.

I don't have much to say, I've just been fumbling around here trying to get used to these lenses and battling headaches. It's been a dull and annoying week so far--I really hate not being able to see!

I just wanted to mention this very neat website called Librivox, where you can listen to public domain books being read. I had found it a couple of years ago, but only started using it recently, when I began working my way through Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone for a discussion on the Classic Literature forum at PaperbackSwap. It's a very long book and it's taking me a while to get through it, so sometimes when I'm cooking dinner or mopping the floor or folding laundry, I listen to a chapter or two on Librivox. It's absolutely free (since they're readng public domain books) and the readers are quite good. So if there's a classic you're wanting to hear, they probably have it.

The snow is melting, the sun is out, and it feels like we're back on track for spring. Over and out!

Happy 200th, Mr Lincoln.

Whenever I think of Abraham Lincoln, I think of this quote from Sarah Vowell's book The Partly Cloudy Patriot:

"How many of us drew [Lincoln's] beard in crayon? We built models of his boyhood cabin with Elmer's glue and toothpicks. We memorized the Gettysburg Address, reciting its ten sentences in stovepipe hats stapled out of black construction paper. The teachers taught us to like Washington and to respect Jefferson. But Lincoln - him they taught us to love."

The weekend that the WW II memorial opened, we went to see it and then strolled down the Mall to see Abe. I had been to D.C. several times, but hadn't visited the Lincoln Memorial since my first visit in 1984. It is so, so powerful to walk up those steps and crane your neck up at him sitting there. If our country has a secular saint, surely it's Abe Lincoln. What a gift he gave us, with his work and his words.

I get the impression that kids don't memorize poems, scriptures or famous speeches any more, which is a real shame, because some of Lincoln's beautiful phrases float around in my mind and give me as much pleasure as the bits of Shakespeare and Bible verses that float around in there, too.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right..."--that's a favorite. Also "the better angels of our nature" from his first inaugural speech.

There have been some really great books about Lincoln in the past few years, and one I recommend is Lincoln's Melancholy by Joshua Wolf Shenk. I haven't very often been as low in my life as he was in his, but I was inspired to read about the coping skills he developed and the way he was able to work through the sorrow and depression that plagued him. What a tremendous man he was.